An Apostate: Nawin of Thais

by Steven David Justin Sills

And yet a year later when the drawing of all his escorts seemed banal and jejune enough to be replaced by a celebration of the ordinary (a painting, for example, like a photograph in a locket, of his then platonic angel in the driver's seat of her car but from a perspective of looking at her through the exterior of a windshield and through the interior of a dangling jasmine rosary that hung from the rear view mirror; another one of his pedantic wife at a distance sitting on a bench outside the Assumption University library while sipping through a straw the juice of a coconut as she read a book through her heavy spectacles; an odd if not grotesque painting of Noppawan with the perspective from the forehead looking onto the dark, leaning moled hills, and blemished declivity of her face; "A Conversation on Surrogate Motherhood," as one painting was mentally entitled in which both women were at a coffee shop, and despite their restrained if not tranquil demeanor the room was filled with their unrestrained, desperate thoughts flying through the air in sundry shades of every color; and others seeming to him more insignificant and raw stylistically than the three aforementioned), he told himself that he was worthless as a painter. He became determined to remove his paint and canvases to a closet and to forswear art altogether. He averred inwardly that all his studies of aching prostitutes who were quickly manufactured off the assembly belts of this world, which stretched decades, centuries, and millenniums toward the past and the future, would not help one of them, being dead and unborn as they were; and for those escorts in his immediate present whom he gropingly attempted to befriend, to sooth their jealous reactions toward his unwillingness to divorce his wife and marry them, and occasionally tried to set up as beauty shop proprietors, owners not merely of sidewalk restaurants but of the open garage variety so common in Thailand, supporting them financially while they sought a high school degree or other certificate, and other futile attempts at empowerment, it appeared that what he had succeeded in doing for the dead and unborn whores was infinitely more. He had delivered no one to their higher potential. Art, he said, was a frivolous embellishment by those who were weary of enduring the ordinary. It was lavish and empty like a string of heavy jewels locked in a safe, or the accumulation of wealth to give specious dignity to the tenuous body of carbon called man. It did nothing for anyone.

It was then that, because of the article, the word, "distinguished," began to snag his consciousness. The word, when used sarcastically, suggested that one was a dirty old man, that acme of all depravity. 'Depravity' was an all inclusive word in which both playboys and bloodthirsty tyrants were erroneously locked in as cell mates. He had not even climbed far into sensual decadence, a different mountain entirely, with play for the playboy tearing his crepe paper heart the inwardly lachrymose and outwardly debonair way that it did, with these bouts of sensing a woman's genitalia as vapid holes being banged as empty drums from inside by a man's stick; these conclusions that sex was just a bored erumpent man banging on any tin trash can in reach for a bit of sound and vibration, and brief moments of total, pellucid understanding called enlightenment as to the absolute absurdity of an instrument of urination being used for intimacy.

He knew that if viewed alone, without the disparaging meanings pretentious and sanctimonious art critics gave to it, the word, "distinguished," was more good than bad. Still, he did not like the elderly connotation of it in reference to himself and he did not think that he was accomplished enough to be considered "distinguished." Nobly and decadently, he had spent many years chasing lurid themes and nasty girls merely because he, from personal experience, could empathize with innocence being snatched away by the hungry wolves of this world—or rather, the more complex commonality of not really being snatched by those fangs, but innocence, in the form of a thigh, being eagerly given to the waylaying wolves so that the whole body could survive. By being tossed morsels of the good life from the beloved abductor in exchange for a thigh, the body could survive and the brain would be more than empty space for it would have someone to love.

Regardless of whether the innocent were considered victims or volunteers, innocence was nonetheless baited and devoured. As a forlorn younger brother who was hated by all except for the one who would use him as a "cheap date," he knew. He knew that corrupted innocence was a perennial ache, which would ensue for as long as there were hungers. And for Nawin, this Jatupon (merely "Jatuporn"), it was an insoluble theme haunting him with many blissful nights and compelling his days to be slavishly spent in pouring color from tubes into imaginary holes on canvas.

Fine as it was in youth to vindicate injustice by painting his tragic madonnas, one could not exactly grow old that way and seem inwardly wise or outwardly respectable, not that he accredited the latter as having so much importance. Still it was a rather repugnant thought that he who wanted to become wise and enlightened once he entered old age would instead become just another distinguished patron of massage parlors, obsessed by vibrant youth, and having found no awareness from all his days beyond his sexual rhythms. From this conclusion he retired from art with a second and more puissant conviction.

Now he, this forty year old birthday boy in a toilet of a train and the stench thereof, was once again trying to recall this same article for he was wondering if the writer had really meant all along that he was an immature painter whose use of the lurid could only sustain him in his youth. For all these years he had been gloating in all things written about him as if none of it were critical or vatic; and it had never occurred to him that perhaps, by behaving so, he was making himself ridiculous.

He tried to recall it as best the copying and projecting apparatus of the human brain allowed so that he might reinterpret the critique, but the lethargic crawl of memory wobbled like an overweight, arthritic dog kept at a distance, and only that salient collar: the word "distinguished," snagged it a little within the thickets of thought that made up the illogic of his consciousness.

Somewhere into this third time of looking up at himself in the mirror for reassurance that he still possessed the same handsome face, he imagined something like an older man within scraping the vestige of his claws through the inner layers and then through the surface skin of his Botox starched face. The hoary phantasm of the stark, ugly possibility of self and the probability of one day finding himself no more distinguished than any old beast fornicating with youth made him once again reel on this, his first day of being a forty year old man.

Suddenly, a plethora of other articles published about him reeled through his mind like microfilm, but also in a most diminished and faded state. Some of these articles might have merely been the hype of writers at the insistence of gallery owners or independent actions of newspapers and magazines to give readers what they wanted: sleaze about a minor celebrity whom through his paintings and tabloid gossip they could learn more about than any snapshot of a movie star in bed with someone other than his wife. From tiny facts or rumors of facts about this exhibitionist god on canvas, the populace who were bereft of significant involvements could gossip about him to make friends with others equally bereft.

"No, my works are not salacious crap—well, not crap anyhow," he told himself, and laughed at his hyper self-criticism for it was he who had been the youngest artist in Thailand to have an exhibit of his work (a decade in retrospective) dangling nude with legs marginally wide open in the temporary art museum. His adulthood had been good indeed, he told himself; and he knew that he could go on savoring his success if only he could find an inspiration to probe the ordinary as profoundly as he did the carnal. "Strange," he thought, "that the carnal is ordinary but that the ordinary does not seem to be carnal," and he dwelled on this paradox that he created for himself until memory intruded on his game.